Friday, 31 January 2014

Jed Udall, the 26-year-old son of Sen. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs, was arrested Wednesday after Boulder County sheriff’s deputies say he broke into three cars and was found with heroin in his pocket.

The Senator’s reaction?

“Maggie and I are deeply distressed to learn of our son’s arrest,” Sen. Mark Udall said in a statement to the Daily Camera. “We love our son and stand with him in his commitment to getting the treatment he needs. We appreciate the private space to deal with this as a family.”

Not a word of apology to the victims. Nor does he say his son is an adult and is on his own. (If he said either in his statement to the newspaper and it was edited out we don’t know. He didn’t post a statement at his Senate website.)

Read further into the story and you learn of a shoplifting arrest in December and this:

The arrest report also says Udall had two non-extraditable warrants out of North Carolina for breaking and entering, and larceny.

Senator Udall’s son appears to be a one-man crime wave. He may need “treatment,” but he could stand some incarceration as well. And our Senate needs members with more respect for the property of citizens. Theft is not a private matter. Perhaps Senator Udall needs to spend more time with his family. Colorado voters may give it to him.

John Donne wrote: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.” Well, Donne never met Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:

Accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a child-killing, cop-murdering terrorist and traitor whose “heinous, cruel and depraved” April 15 attack betrayed his adopted homeland and should earn him death by lethal injection, prosecutors wrote in a damning court filing that rejects the notion he was a lost soul corrupted into doing his brother’s bidding.

Tsarnaev’s prosecution will, sadly, prove very useful to Eric Holder. Other killers, those who didn’t kill cops or kids in traitorous bombings, will now get a death penalty pass while the AG uses this one case to show how tough he is.

Demaryius Thomas’ mother and grandmother will cheer for the Broncos receiver around the prison TV Sunday, both wearing No. 88 jerseys they crafted with strips of tape.

The two women have never seen Thomas play in person. He was 11 when police burst through the door of their home in Montrose, Ga., and arrested both in 1999. Police allowed Katina Smith to walk her son and his two younger sisters to the school bus one last time.

Now she’s at a minimum-security prison in Florida, sentenced to 20 years. Her mother, Minnie Pearl Thomas, who had two previous drug convictions, received two life sentences with the possibility for parole after 40 years.

Smith could have gotten a lighter sentence by testifying against her mother, but she refused.

I’ll save you some time: The linked article mentions not a word about the crimes themselves. That’s felony incurious journalism. USA Todayfills us in:

Both were convicted of charges of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute crack cocaine.

A central premise of the recent pot legalizations across the nation has been the relative harmlessness of marijuana. The “people can put anything they want in their bodies” argument has not been exercised. Indeed, e-cigarettes are being prohibited in indoor spaces in some places.

The War on Drugs isn’t over, it’s being refocused. What if all the money from legalized marijuana taxes were spent on attacking illegal drugs? (Via Drudge.)

Thursday, 30 January 2014

Massachusetts state legislator convicted and jailed for assaulting a woman retains office:

Inmate lawmaker Rep. Carlos Henriquez is doing his Beacon Hill business from his Billerica jail cell, thumbing through bills and budget proposals, and speaking to staff by phone “at least once a day,” according to the disgraced Dorchester Democrat’s legislative aide.

[...]

DaSilva said Henriquez’s office is fielding four or five constituent calls a day, mostly from people concerned about cuts to unemployment benefits.

... about as quickly as healthy young people are signing up for Obambicare:

Syria has promised to give up its entire stockpile by mid-2014, under a deal agreed by Russia and the U.S., but the country has given up less than 5 percent of its chemical weapons arsenal, Fox News confirmed.

According to Reuters, the country will miss next week’s deadline to send all toxic agents abroad for destruction.

The deliveries sent this month in two shipments to the Syria port of Latakia equaled 4.1 percent of the approximately 1,300 tons of toxic agents reported by Damascus to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the report said.

“It’s not enough and there is no sign of more,” a source briefed on the situation told Reuters.

Drudge, who tops his page with a link to it, and this site had the same response to Ann Coulter’s column on immigration, provoked by a new report on immigrants and their politics. Amnesty and increased legal immigration schemes don’t just import poverty, they imports leftists:

Immigrants -- all immigrants -- have always been the bulwark of the Democratic Party. For one thing, recent arrivals tend to be poor and in need of government assistance. Also, they’re coming from societies that are far more left-wing than our own. History shows that, rather than fleeing those policies, they bring their cultures with them. (Look at what New Yorkers did to Vermont.)

This is not a secret. For at least a century, there’s never been a period when a majority of immigrants weren’t Democrats.

At the current accelerated rate of immigration -- 1.1 million new immigrants every year -- Republicans will be a fringe party in about a decade.

Thanks to endless polling, we have a pretty good idea of what most immigrants believe.

According to a Harris poll, 81 percent of native-born citizens think the schools should teach students to be proud of being American. Only 50 percent of naturalized U.S. citizens do.

While 67 percent of native-born Americans believe our Constitution is a higher legal authority than international law, only 37 percent of naturalized citizens agree.

[...]

The two largest immigrant groups, Hispanics and Asians, have little in common economically, culturally or historically. But they both overwhelmingly support big government, Obamacare, affirmative action and gun control.

According the 2012 National Asian American Survey, as well as a Kaiser Foundation poll, only 40 percent of the general public holds a favorable opinion of Obamacare, 42 percent unfavorable. Meanwhile, 51 percent of Asians have a favorable opinion of Obamacare, 18 percent an unfavorable one. Even Koreans support Obamacare by 57 percent to 17 percent.

Overall, 69 percent of immigrants like Obamacare, according to a 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

That same survey showed that only 35 percent of native-born Americans support affirmative action, compared to 58 percent of immigrants, including -- amazingly -- 64 percent of Asians (suggesting they may not be as smart as everyone thinks).

Also surprising, a Pew Research Center poll of all Hispanics, immigrant and citizen alike, found that Hispanics take a dimmer view of capitalism than even people who describe themselves as “liberal Democrats.” While 47 percent of self-described “liberal Democrats” hold a negative view of capitalism, 55 percent of Hispanics do.

Pew also found that only 27 percent of Hispanics support gun rights, compared to 57 percent of non-Hispanic whites. According to Latino Decisions, large majorities of Hispanics favor a national database of gun owners, limiting the capacity of magazines and a ban on semiautomatic weapons.

Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Barack Obama apparently proposes to reinvent the savings bond. Does anybody know why savings bonds went out of fashion? Because they are a terrible way to save money.

The president promised that his MyRA (once he figured out how to say it) would combine a non-trivial rate of return with zero risk. Given that real interest rates on zero-risk propositions are generally right around zero of late, the only plausible way to get that done is with a subsidy. This sounds like a terrible idea.

For conservative activists with long memories, Graham is the hair shirt that never stops itching. Yours truly once wrote an entire [2008] column calling him “The Worst Republican Senator,” and laying out what Michelle Malkin kindly called a “devastating concatenation of the case against the senator.” It’s not that Graham is the most liberal Republican senator; the problem is that he’s such a nasty, even vicious, opponent to the Right when he does break ranks. Anybody to the right of him in such cases isn’t just wrong; we’re “bigots,” or some other epithet.